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本帖最后由 vivicat 于 2009-7-3 00:41 编辑
Our love affair with China is cooling but far from over
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/our-love-affair-with-china-is-cooling-but-far-from-over/2009/02/09/1234027953289.html
Peter Hartcher February 10, 2009
I reached a point a few years ago where I stopped reading anything on China that included this quote from Napoleon: "China is a sleeping dragon. Let him sleep. If he wakes, he will shake the world."
In the great gush of China boosterism of the past decade, this became one of the ritual incantations.
It was always followed by the claim that China had awoken and was about to shake the world. Often, analysts would simply stick this quote together with the country's economic growth rate and, hey presto!, you had an irrefutable case for China's uninterrupted rise to global dominance.
Almost unanimously, economists predicted an endless vista of high growth for China. The consensus a year ago was that a downturn for China would be for annual growth to slow from its breakneck of 13 per cent in 2007 by perhaps 1 to 2 percentage points.
Well, China did awake when Deng Xiaoping began modernising in 1978. And it was shaking the world as it became the world's third-biggest economy.
But now the world has shaken China. It is so badly shaken that it is facing its biggest crunch since the protesters in Tiananmen Square demanded political reform in 1989.
The boosters claimed the global made-in-America recession would not seriously slow China because it was too robust and its growth self-sustaining. One of the fashionable new topics at economic conferences around the world in the past year or so was so-called "decoupling", the idea that the rest of the world might stall but China would zoom gleefully ahead.
That argument is now looking pretty sad. This year Beijing predicts economic growth of 8 per cent. More plausibly, the International Monetary Fund forecasts 6.7 per cent. In other words, its growth has halved.
This still seems rapid, though. So what is the problem? It is that China needs growth of about 9 per cent a year just to absorb the 24 million new would-be workers who spill into its labour market every year. So this year there will be no new jobs. And Beijing estimates that of the 130 million poor rural workers who had moved to the cities to find work, 20 million have been been thrown out of jobs in the past few months.
What the world needed was sane analysis of China, not unthinking cheerleading.
Australia, more than most countries, fell heavily under China's spell. After all, China was paying for the mining boom we enjoyed for the past five years. Rio Tinto was the biggest of many companies that bet its future on China, and now is again as it seeks to raise $5 billion from the Chinese state.
The Beijing Olympics, with its stunning opening and modern architecture, seemed to cap the fairytale. But perhaps Australia's imagined Chinese destiny was made flesh in the person of its new Prime Minister. Kevin Rudd's approval rating, already high, surged anew after he, as Opposition leader, addressed China's visiting President in Mandarin during the APEC gathering in Sydney in September 2007.
But the mining boom has turned bust. Commodity prices have collapsed. The mining sector is cancelling projects and sacking workers. "Decoupling" is dead. The Olympics are over.
"A lot of analysts have had their passports subject to a reality check," observes Mike Komesaroff, an expert on the resources trade.
A China watcher at the Centre for Independent Studies, John Lee, remarks that "I think we have passed the high-water mark in Australia's relationship with China, and you are starting to see more criticism of Chinese politics and society than you were a year ago".
It could get worse. The Chinese leadership has said it is concerned about social stability in the economic downturn.
Even before the economy slowed, the number of protests and riots in China was at a high level. A decade ago, the official number of so-called "mass incidents" was 10,000 a year. Last year, Beijing admitted to 60,000.
So our national love affair with China is cooling. Disenchantment might yet set in in the year ahead.
What is the longer-term outlook? One of the small number of economists to predict its present doldrums, Jim Walker of Asianomics, writes that his "concerns are centred on the current cycle and not on the long-term prospects for China becoming a market economy. The trend towards private property is in place, the trend towards market opening is continuing and the trend towards a more rational policy framework is ongoing."
Ross Garnaut, a former Australian ambassador to Beijing and author of the 1989 report that urged Australia to plunge into north-east Asia, concurs: "There's no doubt we are part way through a bigger trend of Chinese growth. The biggest part of it is ahead of us."
After this downturn, China will return to strong growth, though probably nothing like 13 per cent. "China is on a path to being a bigger, richer economy," Garnaut says. "The future of a lot of Australian companies depends on Chinese investment. Integration through investment is well on its way."
China was the world's biggest economy until as recently as 1830; at the time of Napoleon's observation, it was fading to its weakest in centuries.
With tools of modernisation at its disposal, and unless the country fractures under the strain of recession, its recovery to historical greatness is likely to resume.
Australia has resources that China needs. And China has capital that we need. This complementarity will reassert itself and continue to drive the two countries closer together. We just don't need to gush over it.
Peter Hartcher is the Herald's Political Editor. |
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发表于 2009-5-1 11:41
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